News for The Shins

The fine folks over at vh1.com and vh1classic.com went above and beyond and have provided us with our best birthday present yet—a Sub Pop Turns 20 celebration with over 50 Sub Pop videos from the dawn of time til now. Check it out—there’s Tad, SDRE, Mudhoney, Band of Horses, The Shins, CSS, and more!

We have a trillion videos up for Subterranean’s Best of 2007 on MTV2 and you would be a bad citizen if you did not go HERE and cast a vote or two for The Shins, Band of Horses, CSS, DNTEL, Handsome Furs, The Thermals, and The Go! Team. Get to it! Please and thank you.

R Buckminster Fuller once said, “I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented,” and this would be wholly unremarkable but for the fact that Harry D. Hudson, Sub Pop’s Master of Technolo-something, said nearly this same thing to me about a new product that he is now prepared to offer for sale exclusively on this very website. What is this mysterious invention that will revolutionize the world as we know it? What ungodly creation has Dr. Hudson and the somewhat evil-seeming Professor Fletcher brought to life in their old-timey laboratory? They’re called mp3s! “Mp3” apparently stands for “music product 3”: a mysterious, invisible computer thingy which can be made to produce sounds not unlike music. It is just this sort of devotion to innovative, cutting edge technology that has made Sub Pop Records the unwitting industry leader it is today. Take that, everyone else—Sub Pop has invented the mp3! And now, we’d like to sell some of these things to you.

Since this program is in its infancy we have only a very limited number of mp3s available at this time, and we’re only offering full album downloads. We’re no dummies so we went ahead and mp3’d the big guns—all the Shins albums, the Postal Service, Flight of the Conchords, the new Band of Horses and new Iron and Wine albums are all available as downloadable zip files containing 192k mp3s and high quality cover art for $9.90 per album, except for the FOC ep which is a mere $5.94. We will be adding to this list just as soon as we’re able. This is the future—bask in its glory before someone steals our idea. Oh also, please email Dean at webmaster@subpop.com with questions, concerns, or failures.

After yesterday’s news about Iron & Wine the following is the sort of thing that, as recently as 2002, would have been akin to us proclaiming that Beachwood Sparks were scheduled to play a unicorn rodeo in Narnia. But, it’s true!